Skills (formerly Role-Based Learning) is a Competency Management System tailored for Enterprise organisations. Skills is designed to help organisations manage and track the competencies of their workforce in a structured and scalable manner, and is ideal for high-risk, high-compliance industries like Construction, Utilities, Mining, and Emergency Services.
Features and Benefits include:
- Improved onboarding for your employees to complete any training required for their job roles and position.
- Streamlined recertification, expiry periods can be added to Competencies and Authorisations, ensuring employees remain competent and qualified with up-to-date training. This ensures your organisation stays compliant with any industry or regulatory requirements.
- Simplified up-skilling or re-skilling, employees can be enrolled or self-enrol into additional roles or competencies, providing them with the opportunity to up-skill into a higher role, or re-skill into a new field.
- Managerial overview of employees and their roles, providing your organisation a way to quickly identify which employees have sufficient competencies to carry out specific tasks, or identify those who are in imminent need of upskilling/reskilling.
- Added visibility for organisational overview of current training and ongoing skills needs for your workforce.
Note: Skills is available as a billable addition to your aXcelerate subscription. To discuss how aXcelerate Skills could be the perfect fit for your organisation with our product specialists, please submit an enquiry here.
Users will require the Skills Configuration, Skills Worker Management user permissions and the Enable Webhooks Feature system setting to fully interact with this feature and complete its initial setup.
Skills Overview
Skills provide an organised framework to:
- Create job-relevant Competencies.
- Nominate activities (Workshops, E-Learning, Assessments) needed to attain Competencies.
- Set requisite rules for Competencies.
- Combine Competencies into a Role.
- Assign Roles to workers.
A worker (learner) completes Activities to demonstrate their competency, which in turn fulfils the requirements of their assigned Role.
Once the worker has achieved all Competencies required to hold a Role, the Role will become valid and remain so until the Competencies expire or are revoked.
Authorisations can also be applied and granted along the way, to ensure a worker is not just competent to complete a Role or Skill but is Authorised to undertake the work in question.
Skills Roles
A Role is a profile that is assigned to workers, which determines what Competencies they must hold in order to successfully carry out their job. A Role may relate directly to a worker's position and description, or could be purely reflective of a specific subset of Competencies that a worker in that position is expected to hold.
For example, a worker may have the Position of ‘Site Foreman’, but may also be assigned the Role ‘First Aid Officer’, which encompasses an additional subset of their responsibilities.
The Competencies within a Role will surface any training activities that the worker must complete. A Role’s Competencies can be either mandatory or additional. A Role is considered valid if all required Competencies have an achieved status. This includes any mandatory and additional competencies assigned to the worker.
A worker may be assigned one or many Roles at any time, depending on the organisation’s requirements and structure. Prerequisite rules can be set within Competencies to ensure that a worker assigned many Roles still has to complete training in the order prescribed by the Organisation.
Skills
Skills Configuration
The basic steps for creating a Role are as follows:
- Expand the Skills menu, then select Skills Configuration.
- Select +New within the Role-Based Learning menu.
- Name your new Role, provide a description and add an image (if desired), and then select Create.
Additional configuration steps and further information about Roles can be found in our Roles Article here.
Skills Competencies
A Competency is the combination of experience, knowledge, and abilities needed to do a specific job.
Each Competency can have a set of Requirements configured against it, which determines what a Worker must do in order to attain the Competency. The individual tasks they have to carry out are known as Activities, and can include:
- Sessions that must be attended (Workshops)
- Interactive tasks to complete (Lessons or Assessments)
- Specific files to upload for review (Portfolio Items)
By completing all Activities that make up the overall Requirements of a Competency, a Worker can be granted that Competency, which in turn brings them closer to holding everything they need for their Role.
Skills
Skills Configuration
The core steps for creating a Competency are as follows:
- Select Skills from the navigation menu, then Skills Configuration.
- Expand the Skills menu, then select + New in the top right of the screen.
- Name your new Competency, add a Code, provide a description and add an image if required, then select Create & View to configure your Competency or Create to make a draft competency to configure at a later time.
Additional configuration steps and further information about Competencies can be found in our Competencies Article here.
Skills Activities
To attain a Competency, a worker must complete the activities necessary for the competency to be considered achieved. These activities are defined within the Requirements section of the Competency.
There are several activity types that can be linked to a Competency:
- Competencies
- SCORM (E-Learning)
- aXcelerate Lessons & Assessment Tasks
- Portfolio document uploads
- Workshop Types (Workshop enrolment)
- Qualifications (Class enrolment)
Note: We recommend creating your Activities prior to creating your Competency, as this will allow all activities to be added to the Competency at the time of creation.
Adding an Activity to a Competency:
- Select Skills from the navigation menu, then Skills Configuration.
- Search for and select the Competency.
- Select the Activity type you would like to add to the Competency from the available options.
Additional configuration steps and further information about Competencies can be found in our Activities Article here.
Organisations & Skills
An admin user is able to view all workers regardless of their position within your Organisation Tree; however, a Manager user can only view workers within their own Organisation, or Organisations under their own within the Organisational tree (i.e. Child organisations).
In the below example, Managers within Construction & Projects would only be able to view workers linked to that organisation and its child organisations, whereas Managers linked to Advanced Xtraction Company would be able to view workers within the Construction & Projects, Advanced Xtraction Company and all other organisations within the org tree.
More information regarding Organisations and their set-up can be found in our Organisations guide here.
Manager System User Role Type
The Manager user role in aXcelerate is a restricted user role type that allows Managers to oversee workers within their own organisation, or any child organisations in the Organisation tree. This role type also determines whether filtering is applied to the data that a User can view.
When a User has the Manager role, the system applies Organisation-based filtering, meaning aXcelerate checks the Organisation tree to ensure only records belonging to their Organisation and its sub-organisations are displayed.
Settings
System Users
Creating a Default Manager Role:
- Select Settings, then System Users from the Navigation menu.
- Select Manage User Roles from the top centre of the screen.
- Select + Add New User Role from the top centre of the screen.
- Select Manager from the Role View drop-down and create a Role name and set the MFA/Additional Security option.
- The recommended permissions will be automatically highlighted. These permissions are an example only, and can be customised to provide further access or restrictions as required.
- Once the required permissions have been configured, select Submit to create the User role.
The User role has now been created and can be applied to existing or new users. A contact must be created prior to assigning a user role. Steps to create a contact can be found in our Contact Management guide here.
Link a Manager to an Organisation:
- Navigate to the Organisation's page.
- Select the Update tab.
- Go to the Skills configuration section, and in the Manager (or Alternative Manager field) search for the User.
- Search for the User within the Manager or Alternative Manager text boxes and select the User.
- Click Submit.
Note: While only one contact can be allocated the Manager position of an Organisation, Multiple contacts can be added using the Alternative Managers field. Alternative Managers have the same capabilities as Managers.
Assigning roles to Workers
For a Worker to interact with Skills within their Learner Portal they must be linked to an Organisation and assigned a Role.
Linking a worker to an organisation:
- Navigate to the Contact’s page.
- Select the Update tab.
- Fill in the Organisation field of the contact.
- Click Submit.
Assigning a role to a worker:
- Select Skills from the navigation menu, then select Worker Management.
- Search for or select the worker, then select the worker.
- Search for the Role, then select + Add Role.
Once all Competencies within a Role are achieved, the Role will be considered complete and the employee marked as Competent. The employee will remain Competent until at least one competency is revoked or expires.
If any required Competencies within a Role are incomplete or have expired, the employee is considered not yet competent in that Role.
Note: Roles can also be assigned directly from the Contact Update page.
Manager View
The Manager view provides a streamlined, dedicated interface with four main sections:
- Workforce - for managing worker information.
- Organisations - for managing organisation details and linking contacts.
- Matrix Views - for viewing Skills and Authorisation Matrix pages upskilling/reskilling.
- Help Requests - or viewing and responding to assigned support requests.
The ability to see these options is governed by the Manager’s User Role. The Manager view ensures Managers have the tools they need without requiring full system access.
Workforce Management
The Workforce Management section allows Admins and Managers to manage Roles and their assigned workers, including their Competencies and Authorisations. Managers can select or search for a worker to view their information, including the organisation tree and assigned Roles. Each worker’s training profile can also be accessed from their Contact Profile, using the Business Role field.
Note: Managers will only be able to view workers who have been allocated to the same Organisation, or a child Organisation further down the Organisation tree.
Approval Requests
Approval Requests makes it easier for administrators to find and action pending approvals in one place, instead of relying on email notifications or searching through individual worker records.
You can:
- View pending approval requests for Workshops, Portfolio, and Prior Learning
- Sort by submitted date (newest first by default)
- Filter by request type and search by Contact ID
- Open a request to review details, then approve or reject directly
Note: To view Approval Requests, navigate to the Workforce Management sub-section and select the Approval Requests tab.
Skills Reports
Skills F.A.Q
Why can’t I view the Skills menu?
Confirm your Organisation has added Skills to their Contract as this is an additional item, not included with Standard or Turbo subscriptions. If Skills is enabled for your Organisation, we would recommend checking that you have the correct user permissions to access Skills. The required permissions are Skills Configuration and Skills Worker Management.
Can I use the aXcelerate app for Skills?
Currently, Skills is only available for management via the Admin or Manager portal; however, workers can complete certain Skills activities within the Learner app, such as Lessons or Quiz Assessments.
How do I use Learner Onboarding with Skills?
Learner Onboarding forms must be attached to either a Class or an Accredited Workshop. If a Worker is required to complete an onboarding form as part of their enrolment, we recommend making this part of a Class or Accredited Workshop Instance they must enrol into as part of fulfilling one of their Role’s Competencies. For more information on using Learner Onboarding, see our dedicated help guide here.
Why can’t I see any workers within the Worker Management section?
A Manager is able to see workers within their own linked Organisation. If you are unable to see any workers, this may mean that you have not been added to an Organisation as a Manager, or that the workers are not linked to the relevant Organisation.
An Administrator within your aXcelerate account will be able to confirm if either of these requirements has not been met and will be able to assist with rectifying this issue.
Do I need to recreate nationally recognised competencies (i.e. Units found on training.gov.au) as Skills competencies?
No, accredited, nationally recognised competencies are inherently available in the Skills feature set. Please see our article on Skills Competencies to see how these can be found, configured, and made part of your Skills Roles.
Planned Skills Improvements
We plan to add additional functionality to Skills as this feature matures. Some items on our roadmap for this product include the following:
- Additional Reporting
- Competency versioning
- Audit Logging